It is in Seattle that the constitutionality of the city checking what was in that teriyaki carton in your garbage became a court case.

On Wednesday, King County Superior Court Judge Beth Andrus ruled that what was in that carton stays private.

She ruled that the city’s ordinance allowing garbage collectors to look through people’s trash — to make sure food scraps aren’t going into the garbage — was “unconstitutional and void.”

She entered an injunction against its enforcement.

“I’m thrilled as can be,” said Ethan Blevins, attorney for the Pacific Legal Foundation, which filed the lawsuit on behalf of eight Seattle residents.

This case probably wouldn’t be all that interesting if we weren’t talking about Seattle (which is only marginally to the right of Portland, Oregon) and the question of privacy outside the boundaries of your home. The law under discussion is one which Seattle passed to mandate the composting of food waste, essentially saying that you had to put all of your leftovers in with your lawn clippings and other “yard trash” rather than bagging it up with your other, non-recyclable garbage. The question of enforcement immediately arises in a situation like this of course. Who is going to ensure that you haven’t put the corn cobs from last weekend’s BBQ in with the diapers and ripped t-shirts? Absent some suspicion of other, more sinister criminal activity it’s unlikely the cops want to spend their day doing it, so the only obvious choice is to have the trash collector checking your Hefty Bags.

Not so fast, at least according to the judge in this case. That’s private material and the government doesn’t need to know what you’ve been eating or having anyone engaging in “food shaming” at your expense. Really?

Let’s leave aside for a moment the idea of the municipal government regulating your trash bags at that level. How can you ban an inspection of this sort? It’s already been long established in the courts that trash in a can inside your house is as private as any of your other possessions and John Law needs a warrant before they can look at it. But anything you put out on the curb is beyond the curtilage of your property and you have no reasonable expectation of privacy once you leave it out there for pick-up.

So what is the judge basing this decision on? Is it that the trash collectors aren’t cops so they can’t just go looking through your garbage for information? Private citizens can sometimes simply take things which are left out on trash day, though the rules vary from state to state and even by municipality. (In New York City, for example, you can take things from the trash if you are walking, but not if you load it into a vehicle. Hey… don’t ask me. I just work here.) But the people loading the trash trucks are either municipal employees or private contractors hired by the local government to do precisely that in most cases, so it’s tough to see what bars them from examining the contents.

Seattle passes some crazy laws and this is just another example. But still, I’d be curious to see what a higher court would say on appeal if this ruling were challenged. As far as I know, once you put something out on the curb on trash day it’s pretty much fair game.

We’ve probably had a “shaming” society pretty much as long as the country has been here. Seriously… if you were in Massachusetts in the 1600s and wore the wrong clothes they could lock you in the stocks overnight. But shaming has gone digital in the era of social media which makes it much faster and easier to pass judgment on people you’ve never even met and sometimes it can come back to haunt you. Fat shaming, for example, can get you in trouble, as one comedian recently found out. But not all the shaming is happening online. In Seattle, Washington, the local government is going all old school on the residents and sending out real live people to poke through your trash and call you out if you’re not recycling carefully enough. (Fox News)

When it comes to garbage, the city of Seattle has launched a waste war.

Nine full-time solid waste inspectors have been hired as part of a controversial program to check city trash to make sure people are recycling. Additionally, contracted waste haulers have been effectively deputized as trash police, given the authority to tag bins when people fail to recycle and compost enough.

The program is now the subject of a lawsuit, as residents fume over what some call an intrusive government program.

“I understand people have noble goals,” said Keli Carender, who got tagged two weeks in a row, an offense that soon could bring a fine. “But at some point we have to say, you can’t violate my rights to achieve this noble goal.”

This would normally be a story that’s prime for mocking, but once you get past the rather nanny-state sounding headline there are a couple of valid points. First, the angry residents are making a privacy claim, but that seems to be muddled at best. I know that in other states (like mine) the courts have ruled that anything you put out on trash day is fair game for law enforcement or pretty much anyone else. As the article notes, that’s a case which has gone to the Supreme Court. But the Washington State Supreme Court “went in the other direction” and said that the trash is protected. (Wait… they can do that?) Either way, claiming a violation of their 4th amendment rights seems to be a bit of a stretch to prevent having your trash inspected for recycling content.

Further, trash handling laws tend to be a local issue, or at most a state level debate. Residents have a lot more direct feedback and control of such things. If you don’t like the recycling laws where you live you should probably get them changed. In this case, they have mandated that some minimum percentage needs to be recycled or composted (because… Seattle) and if it’s the law it’s the law, no matter how much of a pain in the butt it may be.

Still, putting tags on people’s trash and highlighting their names in the local police report seems a bit much for a trash infraction, doesn’t it? Couldn’t this be settled with a ticket sent in the mail? I mean, we’re talking about a fine ranging from one dollar to fifty here. And while we’re on the subject of money, they hired nine full time government workers to look for recycling violators? How many fines do you have to collect to make up for all those salaries? Your tax dollars at work!

In Seattle, wasting food will now earn you a scarlet letter — well, a scarlet tag, to be more accurate.

The bright red tag, posted on a garbage bin, tells everyone who sees it that you’ve violated a new city law that makes it illegal to put food into trash cans.

“I’m sure neighbors are going to see these on their other neighbors’ cans,” says Rodney Watkins, a lead driver for Recology CleanScapes, a waste contractor for the city. He’s on the front lines of enforcing these rules.

Seattle is the first city in the nation to fine homeowners for not properly sorting their garbage. The law took effect on Jan. 1 as a bid to keep food out of landfills. Other cities like San Francisco and Vancouver mandate composting, but don’t penalize homeowners directly.

As Watkins made the rounds in Maple Leaf, a residential neighborhood of Seattle, earlier this month, he appeared disheartened to find an entire red velvet cake in someone’s trash bin. Any household with more than 10 percent food in its garbage earns a bright red tag notifying it of the infraction.

So, the collectors not only have to examine your trash, but examine it closely enough to determine if 10 percent of it amounts to food. NPR’s reporting disputes my assumption, but what the collector is really saying below is he’s either painstakingly rifling through trash cans or ignoring the 10-percent rule and profligately offering tags and fines. Neither is good:

Watkins doesn’t have to comb through the trash — the forbidden items are plain to see.

“You can see all the oranges and coffee grounds,” he says, raising one lid. “All that makes great compost. You can put that in your compost bin and buy it back next year in a bag and put it in your garden.”

Food waste is both an economic and environmental burden. Transporting the waste, especially for distances as far as Seattle does, is costly. So too is allowing it to sit out in the open, where it produces methane, one of the most harmful greenhouses gases, as it rots. The second largest component of landfills in the United States is organic waste, and landfills are the single largest source of methane gas.

I’m not saying the goal isn’t worthy. If you’d like to encourage this behavior or do a public awareness campain, fine. But at what cost does this kind of enforcement come? This town is no doubt populated with people who were extremely worried the PATRIOT Act would meant their mail would be read by George Bush or something*. But giving random city officials the right to quantify your trash? No problem.

Strange how city governments so seldom offer a financial incentive to families who might choose to have their Biore strips and old prophylactics and chicken wings examined by their local councilmen instead of just financially punishing everyone who doesn’t. They say compost and recycling. What they mean is compulsion and revenue.

*For the record, I have my own issues with NSA surveillance and metadata dragnetting, which are intellectually consistent with my reaction to this story.